Telescope not an easy sell amid SA’s poverty scars

IT IS a difficult sales pitch: a multibillion-dollar giant telescope used to investigate phenomena so esoteric years of study are required to understand them.

Countries planning to build large scientific infrastructure have to sell the project and its objectives to their citizens.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a good example of this. The telescope will comprise thousands of antennas that will collect relatively weak radio signals from space and use them to map and image the universe. The computing power required to process this quantity of data does not yet exist, and industry wants in. So selling the relevance of the SKA to industry is not that difficult.

The bidding to host the radio telescope came down to two contenders: Australia and SA. In 2012, it was announced that both countries had been selected.

After the excitement had died down, they needed to continue selling the project to their politicians and citizens.

For more, find the article — originally published in Business Day — here.

Sarah Wild is a multiaward-winning science journalist. She studied physics, electronics and English literature at Rhodes University in an effort to make herself unemployable. It didn't work and she now writes about particle physics, cosmology and everything in between.
Sarah was the science editor for both Business Day and the Mail & Guardian before moving on to WildOnScience, and the world of freelance writing and training.
In 2012 she published her first full-length non-fiction book, Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africa's Quest to Hear the Songs of the Stars.
In 2015 she published her second non-fiction book, Innovation: Shaping South Africa through Science.